A big fish from a big pond, Patricia Yeo has graced Food & Wine covers and cookbook covers, and her restaurants in Manhattan, including AZ, garnered every foodie kudo. But her path to culinary success was anything but typical. After what she calls a six-day “Susie Homemaker” cooking course, she answered an ad for an entry-level cooking job with Bobby Flay — and this was after earning her PhD in biochemistry from Princeton. (Can you tell I’m impressed?) Yeo came to Boston in early fall to launch Ginger Park, arriving with one suitcase and an armful of summer clothing. She’s still borrowing sweatshirts from her staff, hoping for a daylong breather for a trip to New York to fetch her boots and her parka.
Why Boston? I’d been in a struggle raising money for a new restaurant, and I was exhausted. Boston was a way to take a deep breath and smell the roses. I needed more balance in my life. All I did in New York was work, and focus on my work. I needed to make time for my family and myself. When you own a restaurant (I was the chef partner in three in New York), you never leave. You take everything personally. Last night, when I was walking home from the restaurant along Appleton Street, I actually saw a guy stop and smell a rose bush.
What’s your take on Boston versus New York? New York is very dog-eat-dog in the restaurant world, at every level. New York has very little of the community I see in Boston. Even the servers in New York are different. New York servers put up with more. In Boston, the staff needs and expects more handholding, more coddling. I don’t have kids of my own, but running a restaurant is like having many children… sometimes, many nagging children. [A server interrupts Yeo: “She is like a mother. Last week when I was sick, she made me a fresh ginger and lemon tea.”]
Tell me a bit about the menu and concept at Ginger Park. It is huge — thirty-four menu items. I get bored so easily that I have to change the menu daily. I love to cook, and I love to experiment. For example, I spent a lot of time growing up and going to boarding school in England, so it seemed natural to me to fill my pot stickers with fresh peas and mint one day, instead of edamame. I’d been thinking along the lines of this concept for years. Small bites of street food. After three bites, your palate gets jaded. Seven little bites, you are still excited. Also, when you invest $7 into a dish versus a $30 steak, you’re more willing to take a chance.
As far as the food world goes, what do you hate? I hate being burned by the bloggers. We’d been open less than a week and already had two scathing blogs by vicious bloggers. When I first went on my own after working with Bobby Flay, he said something I try to make myself remember: “When you start to do well, people will start to try to shoot you down.”
What do you love? I love food anthropology, the evolution of food. I love the idea that the reason the curry of Southern Thailand is a Mussulman curry is the influence of the Islamic palate. I have two women working with me in my kitchen — one is from El Salvador, the other is from Thailand. Neither of them speaks English, but when we were working together on tamales, they both knew what to do. Each had her version of a tamale, just with slightly different ingredients and flavors. Working first with Bobby Flay at Mesa Grill, it was an easy transition for me from Southwestern cooking to East Asian cooking. Both the Southwest and the Southeast Asian cuisine use the same flavors as mainstays — lime, cilantro, chilies, and cumin. It’s fascinating.
